Morphological Priming in Spanish Verb Forms: An ERP Repetition Priming Study

Abstract

Abstract& The ERP repetition priming paradigm has been shown to be sensitive to the processing differences between regular and irregular verb forms in English and German. The purpose of the present study is to extend this research to a language with a different inflectional system, Spanish. The design (delayed visual repetition priming) was adopted from our previous study on English, and the specific linguistic phenomena we examined are priming relations between different kinds of stem (or root) forms.

Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985;Hanson & Wilkenfeld, 1985). N400 effects have been found to be reduced for regular, but not irregular verbs, using this design in German (Weyerts et al, 1996), English (Münte et al, 1999), and Spanish (Rodríguez-Fornells, Münte, & Clahsen, 2002). The rationale for the intervening items, and a potential explanation for the discrepant results in immediate and delayed-priming designs, is the reduction or elimination of semantic priming, which otherwise dominates the behavioral and N400 priming effects.…”

ERPs Reflect Lexical Identification in Word Fragment Priming

“…The amplitude of the N400 has been repeatedly reported to be sensitive to repetition of phonological or orthographic information. A reduced N400 amplitude has been found for targets in rhyming prime-target pairs (e.g., back-lack, Dumay et al, 2001;Praamstra, Meyer, & Levelt, 1994;Rugg, 1984aRugg, , 1984b, for targets that share orthographic similarities with the prime (e.g., scan-scandal, Doyle, Rugg, & Wells, 1996), and for targets in prime-target pairs with the same word stems (e.g., walk-walked, RodriguezFornells, Münte, & Clahsen, 2002;Münte, Say, Clahsen, Schiltz, & Kutas, 1999). Furthermore, the second presentation of words with or without intervening items is reported to reduce the N400 amplitude (e.g., Rugg, Doyle, & Wells, 1995;Rugg & Nieto-Vegas, 1999).…”

ERP signatures of cross-modal semantic fragment priming: Early context effects in speech perception

“…sam-border). Its central-posterior location and its sensitivity to phonological matching between prime and target suggests a close correspondence to the N400, which was found to be similarly modulated in rhyming and alliterating word pairs (Dumay et al, 2001;Praamstra et al, 1994;Radeau et al, 1998;Rugg and Barrett, 1987) or in word pairs with stem priming relations (Münte et al, 1999;Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002). Friedrich and colleagues argue that the central negativity could also relate to the Phonological Mismatch (or Mapping) Negativity (Connolly and Phillips, 1994;Newman and Connolly, 2009).…”